Oscar-Winning Filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin On Love Stories – Their Own, And They One They Tell In ‘Wild Life’ – CPH:DOX
deadline.comWorld class climber Jimmy Chin met his future wife, filmmaker Chai Vasarhelyi, over a mountain – of footage. He had been working for a number of years on the documentary that would become Meru, the story of an attempt by Chin and his fellow alpinists and friends Conrad Anker and Renan Ozturk to become the first to summit the perilous Shark’s Fin peak in the Himalayas.
Perhaps because he was so close to the subject matter, the film wasn’t quite cohering. “I had submitted it to a few film festivals and got turned down,” Chin explained during an Artists & Auteurs conversation at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen.
He told moderator Thom Powers, TIFF’s documentary programmer and host of the Pure Nonfiction podcast, that while struggling over the film he crossed paths with Vasarhelyi at a conference. “I knew that she had quite an accomplished career as a filmmaker,” Chin said. “So, I asked her to screen what I had cut so far.
She didn’t call me back for three months, but it was because she was in Senegal making another film. But then she came back, she screened it, she called me, said, what are you doing with this film?” They bonded on a project that teemed with stunning footage shot by Chin and Ozturk. “Just seeing the world through Jimmy’s lens was astonishing, and it was inspiring,” Vasarhelyi said. “And just understanding this very deep connection to the outside world, and also [it was] kind of the first time I had access as a viewer to these incredibly remote places in such a visceral way.” Feelings of a deeper sort soon kindled between the cinematic collaborators. “Jimmy and I began kind of falling in love in this process,” Vasarhelyi said. “But the main thing for me was I love Jimmy and was falling in love, and I wanted to help
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